How Indian media fabricates think tanks, journalists to churn out anti-China, Pakistan news

A reporter holds a microphone with the logo of ANI during a press conference in India, on March 3, 2023. Photo: VCG 

 

Source: EU DisinfoLab report.Graphic: Global Times

 

A recent report by a European organization investigating fake narratives of Indian media went viral on Chinese social media platforms recently, drawing wide attention to India's supposedly vast smear campaign against China and Pakistan.

Following reports in 2019 and 2020, the latest investigation report by independent non-profit organization EU DisinfoLab, published in February 2023, exposes more details and evidences to prove that Asian News International (ANI), an Indian news agency, has been quoting a number of non-existent organizations, journalists and bloggers to spread disinformation that attacks and smears China and Pakistan. The report further uncovered that India has long been building a huge anti-China and anti-Pakistan disinformation network and that Indian media outlets have built a sophisticated assembly line of fake anti-China and anti-Pakistan news.

On the one hand, the Indian media produces and spreads false narratives about China, and the Indian government restricts Chinese journalists' access to India and deny their rights of reporting a real India, by treating Chinese journalists in an unfair and discriminatory manner during their posting in India and visa application process.

Chinese experts said the investigation report exposes a deliberate effort by India or Indian media to shape negative narratives against China and Pakistan. The presence of such disinformation campaign aligns with India's strained relations with both countries. They pointed out that the production of fake news by Indian media can incite nationalist sentiment within the country and distract people from the real problems of the country and the poor performance of its government.

Within the complex geopolitical context of South Asia, such disinformation campaigns can have far-reaching consequences, which can exacerbate tensions, strain diplomatic relations, and hinder regional cooperation efforts, observers warned.

Bad sources

The investigation report titled "Bad Sources - How Indian news agency ANI quoted sources that do not exist," published by EU DisinfoLab, unveils "its latest investigation into anti-Pakistan/China influence operations," according to the organization.

The report said ANI is an Indian news agency that plays a relevant role in the country's information ecosystem, providing content for many well-established media across India, such as The Print and Business Standard. With this network, ANI acts as a purveyor of news to millions of Indians.

In the report, researchers write that ANI has been repeatedly quoting articles and reports issued by a think tank named the International Forum for Rights and Security (IFFRAS). The think tank was previously chaired by Mario Silva, a former Canadian Member of Parliament (MP), and dissolved in 2014, according to public information provided on a Canadian government website.

However, when they checked IFFRAS' official website, the researchers found that it has kept updating information, including articles, news, books and even conferences, and that ANI has kept quoting information from the think tank's website.

For example, on December 27, 2022, IFFRAS published an article titled "Pakistan's persecution of minorities under scanner again," and on the same day, the article was quoted by ANI in a piece of news headlined "Pakistan's ill-treatment of minorities under scanner after UK sanctions Sindhi cleric," with most of the contents coming from the IFFRAS article.

ANI has quoted IFFRAS more than 200 times from May 2021 to January 2023, and "in most instances, it was not only quoting but using the IFFRAS 'reports' as the backbone of the articles," said the report.

News reports produced by ANI quoting IFFRAS can possibly get republished or reported on by other media outlets. For example, in April 14, 2022, an ANI report quoting IFFRAS was reproduced by The Statesman, an Indian daily newspaper, allowing the ANI report to reach a wider audience.

In addition, researchers of EU DisinfoLab further investigated whether the conference attendees at the think tank quoted in the articles actually exist.

To find out who was attending conferences held by IFFRAS, researchers contacted attendees of a session discussing the "Increasing presence of Muslim Brotherhood." But two of the attendees mentioned by IFFRAS responded that they had never attended such a conference and that the Muslim Brotherhood "had nothing (to do) with their field of expertise."

The investigation report also pointed out that more than 70 speakers mentioned in the fake conferences of IFFRAS did not exist at all.

Another interesting finding is that, in contrast to the frequent updates on its website, IFFRAS' Twitter account has not posted any content since 2021. Therefore, the researchers assumed that "the sole purpose of IFFRAS is to produce content that can be covered by ANI and then republished widely throughout the Indian press."

ANI's editor Smita Prakash responded to the report on Twitter on February 24, dubbing it "defamatory and false."

The Global Times has tried to contact ANI through the email address provided on its website, wanting to get a response on whether the news agency was aware that IFFRAS had been disbanded in 2014 and does not exist now. However, as of the publication of this report, there was no response from ANI.

Apart from IFFRAS, the researchers also looked into another think tank frequently quoted by ANI, the Policy Research Group (POREG), in which the researchers found no sign of the existence of three new members who had reportedly joined the group in the last two years.

For example, one of them is James Duglous Crickton, a misspelling of James Douglas Crickton, who wrote an article claiming that former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf held a secret bank account in Switzerland, which was later covered by ANI.

The researchers said that they have tried to get in touch with the three people through POREG, but have received no response. However, the three people had been quoted by ANI numerous times on topics such as Pakistan's army doctrines and China's "wolf warrior diplomacy," according to the investigation report.

The researchers also tried to get contact with Philippe Jeune, a claimed "Paris-based investigative journo with more than 10 years' experience" and sometimes a claimed "Brussels-based freelance journalist," who was quoted by ANI in a piece of news entitled "European Parliament to withdraw Pakistan's GSP+ status over abuse of blasphemy laws" - a withdrawal that did not happen, and efforts to do so again failed.

Asif Noor, founder of the Friends of BRI Forum, a Pakistan-based think tank, told the Global Times that in the investigation, ANI has been found to quote non-existent organizations, presenting them as credible sources of information. The expert noted that by attributing statements and opinions to these fictional entities, ANI creates a false impression of legitimacy and credibility for the disinformation being spread.

These fabricated figures are used as experts to provide opinions and analysis to further mislead readers and reinforce the false narratives. ANI's articles, containing the disseminated disinformation, are reproduced and shared across various well-established media outlets in India, Asif noted. "This amplification of the false narratives through multiple platforms increases their reach and potential impact, potentially influencing a wider audience and shaping public opinion."



Source: EU DisinfoLab report.Graphic: Global Times

Vast network

The IFFRAS think tank mentioned in the lab report was also found to be linked to the Srivastava Group, as the researchers found that IFFRAS has been registered by using a well-known email address from the Srivastava Group.

The latter is a notorious Indian shell corporation, and the EU DisinfoLab pointed out in its 2020 report that nominally, the group's main business is news media, with offices in Brussels and Geneva, and registrations of more than 750 media, think tanks and more than 550 domain names in 116 countries and regions around the world.

However, the researchers investigated and found that there was no profitable business under the Srivastava Group, and the media and think tanks related to the group basically only had a name but no actual business. For example, the researchers uncovered EU Chronicle, a fake media with fake journalists supposedly covering European affairs, which was actually serving as a platform for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to sign pro-Indian articles.

In fact, the group is a representative of the disinformation war launched by India against China. Under the lead of the Srivastava Group, which is based overseas in Geneva and Brussels, an information warfare network has been woven, with a number of fake media, think tanks and NGOs all over the world.

The fake news produced by the fake media under the group is also published and reprinted by some Indian media websites such as ANI which increases the reach of the disinformation.

For example, on September 17, 2020, an article was published in the EU Chronicle about a letter sent by several MEPs to the President of the European Council Charles Michel, asking for taking strong actions on China's Human Rights atrocities at the EU-China Summit. The article was titled "Meaningful address and strong action needed against China's human rights atrocities." In its coverage of the news, ANI changed the headline as "Members of the European Parliament urge EU to take strong action on China for Human Rights Violation." But then the coverage of ANI was distorted by the Srivastava Group's other fake media, which ran it under the headline: "EU to take strong action on China."

In the end, a simple request by individual MEPs, who are free to send any letter they want to send, was ultimately presented as an official position of the EU on China.

Represented by the EU Chronicle, fake media of India published a large number of discrediting articles on China and Pakistan in an attempt to damage the reputation of the countries internationally and win more support for India from institutions such as the EU and UN.

In addition, according to the lab's investigation, under India's vast network of fake narratives, many organizations created by the group are active in cities which host headquarters of international organizations, such as Geneva, Brussels and New York. These organizations include "South Asia Peace Forum," the "Baloch Forum" and "Friends of Gilgit-Baltistan."

In order to increase the official element and credibility of their organizations, they even paid some MEPs to make pro-India, anti-Pakistan and anti-China remarks, and organized trips for MEPs to Kashmir, Bangladesh and the Maldives. The researchers noted that "some of these trips led to much institutional controversy, as the delegations of MEPs were often presented as official EU delegations when they were in fact not travelling on behalf of the Parliament."

Responsible dissemination of accurate and verified information is crucial in fostering informed public discourse and upholding journalistic ethics, Asif noted. But India lacks the ability and is using it in favor of its own motivations, the expert said.

Beautify image

Experts noted that China and Pakistan have long been targets of India's disinformation campaign.

Topics related to the China-India border region, including the China-India border issue and China's border negotiation with Bhutan, are a major focus of the India's fabrication and smearing on China.

In addition, discrediting China's Belt and Road Initiative and the construction of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and smearing on China's policies in Xinjiang and Xizang regions in terms of ethnic, religious, human rights and other issues are also the top agenda items set by some forces in India in the disinformation war against China, Sun Xihui, an associate research fellow with the National Institute of International Strategy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

With the help of these fake reports, the Indian media not only discredit China, but also try to raise the image of its own government in its community. By building the image of China with social chaos and oppression of people domestically, and deceiving internationally, the India media aimed to beautify India's image of democracy at home and friendship with its neighbors internationally, Sun noted.

The international community's perception of Pakistan and China may be swayed by the misinformation disseminated by India, affecting how these nations are viewed in terms of their policies, actions, and intentions. This can lead to biased judgments and misconceptions about Pakistan and China's contributions to regional and global affairs, Asif said.

To counter false narrative campaigns of India, experts noted that there should be a multifaceted approach involving various strategies. "It is important that China and Pakistan should promote media literacy to educate the public about identifying and evaluating misinformation and disinformation," Asif said.

"Citizens should also utilize social media platforms, official websites, and other digital channels to directly communicate with global audiences," said the expert.

Gary Machado, managing director of EU DisinfoLab, said he thought the muted reaction to the revelation of the disinformation network was partly because it was "clearly managed by Indian stakeholders."

"Imagine if the same operation was run by China or Russia. How do you think the world would have reacted? Probably with international outrage, leading to public inquiries and probably sanctions," he told BBC in an interview in December 2022. 

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Checkmated over Ukraine; Is Ukraine a metaverse nightmare?

 Cornered: Ukrainian armoured vehicles blocking a street in Kyiv as Russian troops stormed toward Ukraine’s capital on Saturday. – AP Nato's actions have made it's Western allies incapable of doing better for Ukraine than Ukraine can do its own relations with Russia

WHEN the wilfully unstoppable force of Nato expansion hits the steadfastly immovable object of Russian national security, war erupts.
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By February 24 when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Moscow’s challenges became exposed and grew more acute.
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Russia cannot hold Ukraine in any sense as resentment to its incursion swells. There can be no assurance Russia can succeed in whatever it seeks to do to Kiev.
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As in all military interventions, moving in is always easier than pulling out – which must eventually happen. And then what?
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All disputes must conclude in negotiations, especially between neighbours, and it is now harder to negotiate. Meanwhile Russia is cast as the sole villain, so an invasion could not have been its preferred option.
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As a power play it is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions and superpower dimensions. Ukraine and Nato may have top billing but the US and Russia are the key actors.
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The 1947 Dunkirk Treaty between Britain and France was a contingency agreement against German or Soviet aggression. This grew to include the Benelux countries and then the US and six others to become today’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
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By 1955 Nato expanded to include WWII foe Germany, leaving the Soviet Union out in the cold. Moscow then established its Warsaw Pact alliance in trying to achieve some balance.
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Since then, Moscow stayed in Nato’s sights on the other side of the fence. Nato’s first Secretary-General Hastings Ismay described its role as “keeping the US in, Germany down, and Russia out.”
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Nato is a Cold War device that was not dismantled after the Cold War but has instead grown. But the official rhetoric in the early 1990s was of consolidation with a few contemplating dissolution.
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As the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991, Nato officials from the US, Britain, France and Germany repeatedly assured Moscow that Nato would not expand. Nato had become the most serious organised challenge to Russian national security.
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US Assistant Secretary of State Raymond Seitz said expansion of membership would not happen “either officially or unofficially.” His British counterpart added that expansion was “unacceptable”.
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German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher agreed and said so. Then Nato’s expansion happened.
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When Russia complained, Nato stalwarts said any agreement was only verbal and not written down, implying that what they said could not be trusted. Later Nato claimed there had not even been a verbal agreement.
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Earlier this month Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper reported that Prof Joshua Shifrinson of Boston University had found a declassified document confirming that a pledge on Nato’s non-expansion had been made. Elsewhere it is reported that President Bill Clinton broke that pledge.
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In 1999, Nato expanded by including former Soviet bloc countries Poland, Hungary and Czechia. Russia seethed but could do little.
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In 2004, Nato expanded further by admitting former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russia complained again but once more its security concerns were ignored.
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As Nato missiles aimed at Russia moved closer to its borders, Moscow protested but Nato said they were only there because of Iran. Russia was unconvinced.
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After Ukraine’s independence its government continued friendly relations with Russia. But the US engineered the 2004-05 Orange Revolution that toppled the government and replaced it with one closer to the West.
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France and Germany invaded Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries with each attack ending in disaster. Napoleon’s and Hitler’s forces nonetheless made damaging incursions into the Russian heartland and national psyche.
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Today France and Germany are among European nations careful in managing relations with Russia. However, a US-led Nato with less experience and less sensitivity to Russian security concerns has acted with less care.
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Russia remains the world’s largest country by area rich in natural resources like oil and gas. It is not a threat to Europe or even Ukraine if agreements made can be honoured, but provoking it can produce a different result.
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Using Nato to challenge and undermine Russian interests will not end well for anyone. US interests are protected with the Atlantic Ocean as buffer, but European members of Nato share a continent with Russia and would have different priorities.
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The UN wants Russian forces to withdraw from Ukraine and return to base almost as much as Russia wants Nato to withdraw from its eastward momentum and return to the 1997 Nato-Russia Founding Act. Although neither may happen soon, Moscow has no interest or expressed desire to occupy Ukraine so the former is more likely than the latter.
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Ukraine for now is trapped in a vicious cycle of violence and disintegration beyond its control. It is a familiar plight of pawns caught between incompatible great powers.
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Ukraine wants urgent negotiations with Russia while Russia wants Belarus to host talks on the Minsk accords for a ceasefire and phased measures towards a compromise. Even if talks are possible it will be an uphill task since Moscow and Kiev have different interpretations of the 2014-15 terms.
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Among Biden’s errors is targeting Putin personally as if another Russian leader would have acted differently. Even Boris Yeltsin would have done the same over Ukraine, while a nationalist like Vladimir Zhirinovsky would have acted tougher and earlier.
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For the West to dump the Nord Stream 2 deal supplying Europe with Russian gas punishes only Europe which now has to pay many times more for US supplies. On Feb 4 Russia signed a new US$117.5bil oil and gas deal to supply China instead.
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Western observers worry that China may learn unsavoury lessons from Russia’s actions in Ukraine to further its disputed claims in Asia. Any lessons would be more akin to Nato’s gradual encroachment on Russian territory.
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The apparent beneficiary from Ukraine’s crisis is China, being a distraction for the West which also increases Moscow’s dependence on Beijing. But China is also awkwardly positioned as it wants to maintain good ties with all parties.
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The only unqualified beneficiary of the crisis is China-Russia relations, which must count as another major strategic blunder for Nato and the West.
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Bunn Nagara is a political analyst and Honorary Research Fellow of the Perak Academy. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.

By Bunn Nagara, Author at ISIS

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Is Ukraine a metaverse nightmare?

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The Russian pipe-laying ship 'Akademik Tscherski' which is on deployment for the further construction of the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline, is moored at the port of Mukran on the island of Ruegen, Germany, on Sept. 8, 2020. The gas is still flowing from Russian even as bullets and missiles fly in Ukraine. But the war is raising huge questions about the energy ties between Europe and Russia. The conflict is helping keep oil and gas prices high due to fears of a possible reduction in supplies, and consumers will continue to face financial stress from that. 

 

The real-life cost of war: People walk at the border crossing between Poland and Ukraine, in Medyka, Poland, on February 24, 2022. Photo: Reuters

 Moving from a unipolar world to a multipolar world was always likely to be messy and risk-prone. But few saw how fast we moved from beating war drums to actual armed conflict between the Great Powers, the latest being in Ukraine. Are we on a march of folly to World War III, or have key players lost sight of reality?

`Lest we forget, World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) were fought to keep down rising powers—Germany and later Japan.
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Russia and China suffered the most casualties in WWII, and both were allies against German Nazis and Japanese militarists.
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The United States became the real winner, but decided after WWII to contain communism in both the Soviet Union (USSR) and China.
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Fifty years ago, in 1972, US President Nixon set aside enmity against China, restored US-China relations, and in one strategic stroke, isolated the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse two decades later.
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The great achievement during the Cold War was the avoidance of nuclear conflict, with the Cuban missile crisis being a live test of brinkmanship.
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Both sides climbed down when the USSR removed missiles from Cuba, and the US quietly removed missiles from Turkey.
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President Kennedy understood that grandstanding on moral issues should be restrained, because in a nuclear war, mutually assured destruction is madness.
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After seven decades of peace, the Western media has been painting the multipolar world as a black-and-white conflict between good vs evil, democracy vs autocracy—without appreciating that the other side may have different points of view that need to be heard.
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By definition, a multipolar world means that liberal democracies will have to live with different ideologies and regimes.
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Today, YouTube and the Web provide a wealth of alternative views than mainstream media, such as CNN or BBC.
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Prof John Mearsheimer, author of the influential book "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics," offers the insight that the Western expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) was the reason why Russia felt threatened.
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The more the Nato allies try to arm Ukraine, the more insecure Russia gets.
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In essence, Russia wants a buffer zone of neutral countries like Austria, which are not members of Nato, but that does not exclude trade with all sides.
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Carnegie Moscow Center analyst Alexander Baunov described how "the two sides appear to be negotiating over different things.
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Russia is talking about its own security, while the West is focusing on Ukraine's."
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What he is describing are two sides that are each in their own social bubble or virtual reality (VR) Metaverse, deaf to the other side's views.
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The term "Metaverse" came from a 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel titled "Snow Crash," where the Metaverse is the virtual refuge from an anarchic world controlled by the Mafia.
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Today, Metaverse is an online virtual world where the user blends VR with the real, flesh-and-blood world through VR glasses and software augmented reality (AR).
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In other words, in Metaverse, your mind is colonised by whatever algorithm and virtual information that you get—real or fake news.
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Metaverse is escapism from reality, and will not help us solve real world problems, especially when we need to talk eyeball to eyeball.
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The Metaverse designer is more interested in controlling or influencing our minds, feeding us what we want to hear or see, rather than what information we need to have to make good decisions. The risk is that we think VR conflict is costless, whereas real war has real flesh-and-blood costs.
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.In short, the more we look inward at our own Metaverse, the more we neglect the collective costs to the world as it lurches from peace to war
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Surprisingly, I found the right-wing influential Fox commentator Tucker Carlson asking better questions than CNN or BBC commentators.
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In his show Tucker Carlson Tonight, in the segment "How will this conflict affect you?" he asked bluntly why Americans should hate Putin and what the war will cost every American.
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Carlson asked some really serious questions, even though his views are partisan—have the Democrats, with their moral concern to hate Putin, forgotten the big picture of war costs?
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First, would Americans be willing to go into a winter war with Russia?
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Second, would they pay much higher gas prices as oil prices have already hit above USD 100 per barrel?
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Although economic sanctions are applied, even Europe will not be willing to risk cutting off gas supplies from Russia, since Russia accounts for 35 percent of European gas supplies.
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Third, is Ukraine a real democracy?
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Carlson's 2018 book "Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution" is well worth reading to understand how conservative Americans think about elites who care about themselves more than society at large. 

Carlson asked some really serious questions, even though his views are partisan—have the Democrats, with their moral concern to hate Putin, forgotten the big picture of war costs?
`
First, would Americans be willing to go into a winter war with Russia?
`
Second, would they pay much higher gas prices as oil prices have already hit above USD 100 per barrel?
`
Although economic sanctions are applied, even Europe will not be willing to risk cutting off gas supplies from Russia, since Russia accounts for 35 percent of European gas supplies.
`
Third, is Ukraine a real democracy?
`
Carlson's 2018 book "Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution" is well worth reading to understand how conservative Americans think about elites who care about themselves more than society at large.
`
In sum, the decade of 2020s may face a tough period of escalating conflicts at local, regional and global levels, with proxy wars that disrupt each other's economies and social stability.
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If states fail, and poor and hungry people migrate at a larger scale, even more border conflicts are likely, since most will want to go to the richer countries in the North, such as Europe and America.
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There is no ideal world where everyone is good and the other side is bad.
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In a multipolar world, there will be all kinds of people that we don't like, but we have to live with them.
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A negotiated peace is better than mutual destruction.
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In Metaverse, virtual life can be beautiful, moral and perfect, but the real world is lurching towards a collective nightmare.
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We should not kid ourselves that the Metaverse VR of self-deception is the real world.
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We either sleepwalk to war, or have the courage to opt for sustainable peace.
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The real question is: Who is willing to climb down and eat the humble pie for the sake of peace?
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By Andrew Sheng is adjunct professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing and the University of Malaya. He was formerly the chairman of the Securities and Futures Commission, Hong Kong. 

Tan Sri Andrew Sheng (born 1946) is Hong Kong-based Malaysian Chinese banker, academic and commentator. He started his career as an accountant and is now a distinguished fellow of Fung Global Institute, a global think tank based in Hong Kong.^[1] He served as chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) before his replacement by Martin Wheatley in

Andrew Sheng comments on global affairs from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are his own.

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Fake News and Hard Truths

Balanced views: The print house of the daily newspaper Le Monde in France. When print media and television dominated the distribution of information, media could be trusted to give a balanced view to enable the reader to judge what is correct. — AFP

We live in an information age, or more likely, a disinformation age.

Growing up in a world that worships technology and knowledge, we have now entered a phase when we no longer are able to trust what information we receive is fake news or not. Worse, we don’t know whether the provider of the information is trustworthy or not.

Fake news has many definitions. Basically, fake news are manufactured with an intent to mislead, damage someone or to attract attention to a cause, and gain either financially, politically or higher media attention. Such information could be outright sensational, partial, incomplete, provocative, false or fabricated, with some journalists even paying for leaks or gossips. Today’s fake news also include tampered photographs and videos, or encouraging people to “act” in front of the cameras.

Up until the 1970s, when print media and television dominated the distribution of information, media could be trusted to give balanced views, setting out different sides of the argument to enable the reader to judge what is correct. Newspapers and television channels were rich enough to finance investigative journalism in uncovering the “truth”.

But with the arrival of digital information, these traditional channels lost advertising revenue to social media, so the quality of journalism deteriorated, and in order to attract attention, newspaper and television content became more and more sensational, as well as more biased to one side.

The battle over readership also affected social media, where the value (advertising revenue) of the media outlets depends on their ability to attract viewers and readers.

How important is fake news? When you click “fake news” in Google search, you get 1.48 billion results, versus 380 million for “Jesus Christ”. Trump gets 2 billion, which goes to show how successful he is in social media.

Is fake news damaging and should it be regulated?

Canadian think-tank Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI) conducted an online survey in 25 countries on Internet Security and Trust and found that Facebook was the most commonly cited source of fake news, with 77% of Facebook users saying they had personally seen fake news there, followed by 62% of Twitter users and 74% of social media users in general.

The vast majority think that fake news is made worse by the Internet, with negative impact on their economy and worsened polarisation of views.

Significantly, one-third (35%) pointed to the United States as the country most responsible for the disruptive effect of fake news in their country, trailed significantly by Russia (12%) and China (9%).

There are clearly lots of bad online trolls & social media platforms who act to spread fake news, but it is very difficult to agree on who should regulate fake news and decide what is fake or not. Some people believe in self-policing by the social media platforms, but others want governments to be involved, but are also wary of censorship.

My own view is the apparently spontaneous protests in Hong Kong, Barcelona, Santiago, France, Indonesia and in the Middle East are clearly associated with the rapid spread of social media, including the tools to protest, organise and riot.

What is particularly disturbing is the huge divide of opinions, including violent action to stop the other party from presenting their points of view.

The opposing view is often labelled fake news with even the courts being questioned if they rule against the prevalent views.

Is free speech turbo-charged by social media promoting hate and divisions that increasingly verge on violence and social breakdown?

Australian philosopher Tim Dean has recently questioned whether free speech has failed us?

As he rightly points out, “Free speech is not an absolute good; it is not an end unto itself. Free speech is an instrumental good, one that promotes a higher good: seeking the truth.”

The real problem is that if we do not have facts, we cannot have rational debate on what is truth.

The rule of law works on the principle that if there is dispute in society, it is resolved civilly either through the courts or through the political process. But once violence is involved, the rule of law breaks down.

As Professor Dean says, “free speech only fulfils its truth-seeking function when all agents are speaking in good faith: when they all agree that the truth is the goal of the conversation, that the facts matter, that there are certain standards of evidence and argumentation that are admissible, that speakers have a duty to be open to criticism.”

If however, one side blocks out the opposing view through intimidation, insults, threats, violent action and the wilful spread of misinformation, then civil discourse disappears, as does the rule of law.

This is clearly the age not of information but of anger. As a result of financial capitalism, huge inequalities have been allowed to fester, breaking down rational discourse, engendering distrust of the establishment and old order, and pushing hate and divisions.

Should we allow social media to turbo-charge this process, not of healing but polarisation?

Singapore takes step to regulate fake news

The Singaporean government has taken the bold step of regulating fake news through the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (Pofma), which came into effect this month. Under the act, the Singapore government can take action on false information on the Internet, either ordering that it be taken down, corrected or order technology companies to block accounts that are spreading untruths.

A wise friend told me that we are actually living in a fractured generational divide. The old wants to maintain the old order of stability. The young thinks that this is rigged against them and want to change the system that they will inherit. But something is seriously wrong when school children think that it is right to throw petrol bombs and that it is cool to beat up policemen and anyone that they think stand in their way.

For even reputable channels such as the BBC to start glorifying such action, one wonders whether fake news has truly won.

Andrew Sheng for Asia News Network

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Shocking news and curious comments

  

Why bother to formulate a new law to check fake news when the real stories are already incredible?

' There must be better explanations for such incredible reports and the bizarre responses from people in power.'


OVER the past week, the news about Malaysia has been running the range from the outrageous to the absurd.

To use a quirky English phrase, the stories beggar belief. In other words, too surreal to be believed.

With the Government proposing a new law to check the spread of “fake news”, there must be better explanations for such incredible reports and the bizarre responses from people in power.

I am listing three examples. The first is Switzerland’s decision to confiscate the equivalent of RM400mil, purportedly linked to 1Malaysia Develop­ment Bhd (1MDB), which was seized from Swiss banks last year.

The Swiss lawmakers are set to debate a motion to en­­able part of the funds to be sent back to Malaysia, but according to recent reports, there were no claimants for the money. For context, the RM400mil is more than this year’s budget for my home state of Melaka and the surplus of RM26.4mil can pay for the new bridge on the alternative coastal road in Klebang.

Next is the 91m super yacht, Equanimity, impounded off Bali last Wednesday.

Indonesian police seized the vessel sought by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in response to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) request to enforce a court order.

Police spokesman Muhammad Iqbal Abduh said the US$250mil (RM976mil) yacht’s Auto­ma­ted Identification System (AIS) had been switched off in nearby seas before the seizure.

Penang-born businessman Low Taek Jho, who is also known as Jho Low, criticised the DoJ for not proving any offence before acting.

“It is disappointing that, rather than reflecting on the deeply flawed and politically motivated allegations, the DoJ is continuing with its pattern of global overreach – all based on entirely unsupported claims of wrongdoing,” read a statement sent by his unnamed spokesman.

Eyebrows were raised when Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamed Apandi Ali said the Government would not claim the yacht.

But Communications and Multimedia Minister Datuk Seri Salleh Said Keruak’s peculiar comment that the DoJ had not shown any “tangible proof” of Low’s ownership of the yacht drew ire and scorn.

He said besides allegations in the civil suit, on hold since last August, there was no evidence of Low’s ownership.

As former minister of trade and industry Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz noted, all it takes is a simple search. The “SuperYacthFan” website, which has a directory of the world’s wealthiest yacht owners, states that it belongs to Low and his Hong-Kong-based investment fund, Jynwel Capital.

If Low is innocent, the solution is simple: Just bite the bullet and face the DoJ.

The third curious case involves Criminal Investigation Department (CID) director Comm Datuk Seri Wan Ahmad Najmuddin Mohd’s frozen Australian bank account.

Australian police froze the A$320,000 (RM970,490) account after filing a forfeiture application in the New South Wales Supreme Court in March last year. 

Strangely, the senior police officer does not want his almost RM1mil back. His reason? High legal costs.

Australian police noted a “flurry of suspicious cash deposits” into the CID director’s account, which had been dormant since it was first opened in 2011.

The account reportedly grew by nearly A$290,000 (RM879,500) in a month in 2016, mostly in deposits below A$10,000 (RM30,330) – the limit for law enforcement agencies to receive possible money-laundering alerts.

The money came in from branches and ATMs around the country, from the tiny towns in Queensland and in Tasmania to the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne, a week after the officer visited Australia.

In response, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun said an inquiry found that the account was opened in 2011 to enable the transfer of funds to finance the CID director’s son’s education in Australia.

The IGP said the dormant account was reactivated in 2016 for the officer’s daughter’s master’s degree, adding that Comm Wan Ahmad Najmuddin provided documents to prove the money was from the sale of a RM700,000 house in Shah Alam.

Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission deputy chief commissioner Datuk Seri Azam Baki initially ruled out any further probe as both Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and the IGP had exone­rated the CID director. However, Azam has since been quoted as saying the MACC had begun investigating the matter following a report lodged by an unidentified whistleblower.

Deputy Home Minister Datuk Nur Jazlan Mohamed provided another queer twist to the case by suggesting that Australian authori­ties were using the media to embarrass Malaysia and by asking if they had an axe to grind.

With more doubts continuing to be raised over the case, Dr Ahmad Zahid said Comm Wan Ahmad could have been “a little naïve” about Australia’s legal system.

We can’t blame Malaysians to be sceptical, given the status of the person in question.

Naïve or not, just how costly can it be to hire a good lawyer in Australia to seek justice for the huge amount of money wrongly confiscated?

There have been such cases before and Malaysians have won, most notably former Selangor mentri besar Tan Sri Muhammad Muhammad Taib.

On May 1998, he was acquitted of currency regulation breaches involving more than A$1.2mil (RM2.9mil then).

Muhammad had pleaded not guilty to knowingly making a false currency report when entering the country on Dec 16, 1996, and then failing to declare currency when leaving six days later.

Besides saying that the ex-teacher’s English was not good, his lawyers argued that he didn’t know the country’s money exchange laws and that the funds were for buying land for himself and his three brothers.

How much he paid the lawyers remains a mystery, though.

Media consultant M. Veera Pandiyan likes this quote by Albert Einstein: Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Along The Watchtower by M.Veera Pandiyan The Star



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How to Spot Fake News?

All in a day's words in politics

Telling fact from fiction, fake news

Easy target: Fake news is a big problem here because many of us are too impressionable when it comes to news on the Internet.

HARDLY a day passes without someone sharing a video with me. No one bothers to check, not for a minute, if this could be nothing more than a fake video gone viral. Yet, amazingly, they are quick to forward such things to me.

And that doesn’t even include the unsolicited political messages, through which senders expect their receivers to echo their political enthusiasm.

More alarmingly, residents chat groups on uncollected rubbish or poor maintenance, suddenly see political messages popping up in them. Even prayer and old classmates chat groups aren’t spared, my goodness.

Blame it on what is often dubbed “silly season”, leading up to the general election, but don’t test our patience by diverting our attention to something trivial. It is downright irritating and insulting. And who cares about these politicians, anyway? Not everything in life is about politics, after all.

On Friday, a video went viral on what looked like a gun fight between the police and a notorious gang in Kuala Lumpur.

Some truth-seekers took the trouble to check with the media, but most would have despatched it to their friends in no time at all.

As trained journalists, we obviously scrutinised the video to look for give-aways. It doesn’t take a detective to pick out the holes, but then, there are many gullible Malaysians.

For one, the tiny yellow taxis in the video don’t exist in KL. There is no such building with that staircase structure in the capital, either, and there was a camera crew in plain view running around filming the action scenes, clearly indicating a movie set.

Most of the cars in the video aren’t even models we regularly see in Malaysia, and there was also a guy who ran by wearing what appeared to be heavy clothing.

On Thursday night, it got even sillier.Leaping out of the world wide web was a video of what’s been made to look like a Malaysian student being bullied in a classroom.

The comments by some racist airheads really infuriated me. With the victim appearing Chinese, the bully possibly Malay – he looked Indian to me – it became fertile ground to sow the seeds of hate.

At no point did it occur to them that this video could have come from Singapore. It didn’t even cross their minds that Malaysian students no longer wear uniforms entirely in white. The last time students were decked completely in white was probably in 1979 – during my time as a student. And desks and chairs in green? In our schools?

The Education Ministry has come out to confirm that the incident in that widely-shared video happened in Singapore on Feb 9.

Describing the footage as a “severe case of bullying”, Deputy Education Minister Datuk P. Kamalanathan urged netizens to stop spreading the clip.

“This happened at Westwood Secondary School in Singapore. Please don’t spread this video and claim that it happened in Malaysia.

“Before forwarding anything, it would be wise to authenticate its veracity to avoid confusion and misinformation,” he added.

A group of students from Westwood Secondary School were filmed punching, kicking and throwing chairs at a classmate in a video that then went viral, reported Singapore’s The Straits Times on Feb 18.

In the video posted on Facebook page Fabrications About Singapore on Feb 15, a student can be heard egging his friends on to “teach” one of their classmates a lesson.

Two students were captured throwing chairs at a boy seated at his table in a classroom while on his mobile phone. The boy is stunned when a chair hits his head.

A student then slaps the boy, before throwing a series of punches and kicks at him.

Then, the student overturns the boy’s chair, shoves him to the floor and continues to pummel him.

Then, there was the fake sex video, which purportedly featured national badminton hero Datuk Lee Chong Wei as a “movie star”.

I meet my fellow Penangite regularly, and I can safely say that I have observed him up close and personal.

I can tell that Lee is much more muscular than that skinny, presumably, porno actor in the video, and the hairstyle doesn’t even match our sports idol’s.

Lee has done right by making a police report, and let’s hope the police, with the help of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, swiftly track down the culprits of this vicious smear campaign.

It’s obvious that some people not only want to discredit the three-time Olympic silver medallist but are looking for maximum mayhem by aligning their dubious act to coincide with the release of his feature length biopic Lee Chong Wei: Rise of the Legend next month.

And that’s far from the end of the tall tales. There’s also this pathetic fake news about rejected Musang King durians from China – timed to perfection to be “reported” right before the International Durian festival in Bentong.

The Internet burned with a doctored picture depicting a mountain of the “rejected” fruits, which were said to have been exposed to extremely high levels of insecticide.

Those who shared that piece of poor journalism – either because they were sincerely concerned, genuinely ignorant or politically motivated – didn’t know, or cared to find out that Malaysia doesn’t export durians in its original fruit form but rather, as frozen pulp in packages.

And for sure, the Chinese wouldn’t have wanted to bear the freight charge to return these bad durians to Malaysia. The life span of our durian is only a day or two. How could it have been stacked up like that in the picture?

Durian lovers who inspected the picture could tell they were not Musang King, but instead, something of Thai origin.

With the general election looming, the recycled rumours of Bangladeshi phantom voters arriving by the planeloads at KLIA2 have resurfaced. Even an opposition state assemblyman, in her Chinese New Year video criticising the #UndiRosak activists, cheekily added that “even the Bangladeshis want to vote.” Can you picture 40,000 of them milling at our airport?

Although not a shred of evidence has come to light to back up the incredulous claim, the myth continues to be perpetuated, and it’s a given it will be rinsed and repeated. Perhaps it’ll be the Nepalese or Rohingya this time?

While the ordinary Malaysian can be forgiven for being easily swayed, it’s an entirely different story when journalists find themselves duped, or God forbid, spreading the “news”.

In the 2013 general election, a prominent TV presenter posted on his Facebook page claiming a blackout occurred at the Bentong counting centre, which led to the Barisan Nasional winning the parliamentary seat, slyly implying the coalition cheated during the result tabulation.

He got his network into hot water when he returned to his FB profile to say, “when my child is born, I will ask him to write an essay with the title ‘The Blackout Night’. The beginning of the essay would be on May 5, 2013, there was a stiff fight in the Bentong seat. Someone had said that he would cut his ears if it is lost, and then the counting process started, blackout ...”

To credit MCA president Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai’s opponent, DAP challenger Wong Tack denied the rumours. But let’s hope this presenter has since matured, and perhaps, become more cynical as a journalist or presenter, at least.

The most frequent fake news that sparks to life every few weeks would be the dates of the Parliament’s dissolution and polling.

Interestingly, in the case of the polling date “report”, it involved the Prime Minister having an audience with the King, accompanied by the Deputy Prime Minister and Speaker.

It’s all very simple, really – the PM doesn’t need anyone tagging along, and after meeting the King, he surely can’t be fixing a date since that job belongs to the Election Commission.

A news portal reported that fake news is a big problem here because many of us are too impressionable when it comes to news on the Internet.

The Asian Correspondent reported: “Without questioning the veracity of certain claims and announcements, it seems that oftentimes, anything resembling a news story – whether shared on social media or via mobile messaging apps – is swallowed wholesale.

“Let’s look at how WhatsApp has become a popular platform to spread news. How many of you have received forwarded messages that clearly resemble fake news and could have easily been dismissed as such? I’m sure so many have, and speaking from experience, it definitely gets frustrating.

“The worst part is that when you question the person who unwittingly forwarded the news, he or she would say, ‘I don’t know if it’s true or not. I received it from someone else, so, I’m just forwarding.’”

This has happened continually because no one is punished for their unscrupulous and reckless deeds, even if their actions lead to undesirable consequences amounting to racial tension, riots and even death.

And the campaigning hasn’t even begun! So, let’s put on our thinking caps and brace for the inevitable soon – a deluge of fake news.

On the beat Wong Chun Wai

Wong Chun Wai began his career as a journalist in Penang, and has served The Star for over 27 years in various capacities and roles. He is now the group's managing director/chief executive officer and formerly the group chief editor.

On The Beat made its debut on Feb 23 1997 and Chun Wai has penned the column weekly without a break, except for the occasional press holiday when the paper was not published. In May 2011, a compilation of selected articles of On The Beat was published as a book and launched in conjunction with his 50th birthday. Chun Wai also comments on current issues in The Star.


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Fake news, piracy and digital duopoly of Google and Facebook

“FAKE NEWS” has seemingly, suddenly, become fashionable. In reality, the fake has proliferated for a decade or more, but the faux, the flawed and the fraudulent are now pressing issues because the full scale of the changes wrought upon the integrity of news and advertising by the digital duopoly — Google and Facebook — has become far more obvious.

Google’s commodification of content knowingly, wilfully undermined provenance for profit. That was followed by the Facebook stream, with its journalistic jetsam and fake flotsam. Together, the two most powerful news publishers in human history have created an ecosystem that is dysfunctional and socially destructive.

Both companies could have done far more to highlight that there is a hierarchy of content, but instead they have prospered mightily by peddling a flat-earth philosophy that doesn’t distinguish between the fake and the real because they make copious amounts of money from both.

Depending on which source you believe, they have close to two-thirds of the digital advertising market — and let me be clear that we compete with them for that share. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates they accounted for more than 90% of the incremental increase in digital advertising over the past year. The only cost of content for these companies has been lucrative contracts for lobbyists and lawyers, but the social cost of that strategy is far more profound.

It is beyond risible that Google and its subsidiary YouTube, which have earned many billions of dollars from other people’s content, should now be lamenting that they can’t possibly be held responsible for monitoring that content. Monetising yes, monitoring no — but it turns out that free money does come at a price.

We all have to work with these companies, and we are hoping, mostly against hope, that they will finally take meaningful action, not only to allow premium content models that fund premium journalism, but also to purge their sites of the rampant piracy that undermines creativity. Your business model can’t be simultaneously based on both intimate, granular details about users and no clue whatsoever about rather obvious pirate sites.

Another area that urgently needs much attention is the algorithms that Silicon Valley companies, and Amazon, routinely cite as a supposedly objective source of wisdom and insight. These algorithms are obviously set, tuned and repeatedly adjusted to suit their commercial needs. Yet they also blame autonomous, anarchic algorithms and not themselves when neofascist content surfaces or when a search leads to obviously biased results in favour of their own products.

Look at how Google games searches. A study reported in The Wall Street Journal found that in 25,000 random Google searches ads for Google products appeared in the most prominent slot 91% of the time. How is that not the unfair leveraging of search dominance and the abuse of algorithm? All 1,000 searches for “laptops” started with an ad for Google’s Chromebook — 100% of the time. Kim Jong Un would be envious of results like that at election time.

And then there are the recently launched Google snippets, which stylistically highlight search results as if they were written on stone tablets and carried down from the mountain. Their sheer visual physicality gives them apparent moral force. The word Orwellian is flagrantly abused, but when it comes to the all-powerful algorithms of Google, Amazon and Facebook, Orwellian is underused.

As for news, institutional neglect has left us perched on the edge of the slippery slope of censorship. There is no Silicon Valley tradition, as there is at great newspapers, of each day arguing over rights and wrongs, of fretful, thoughtful agonising over social responsibility and freedom of speech.

What we now have is a backlash with which these omnipotent companies are uniquely ill-equipped to cope. Their responses tend to be political and politically correct. Regardless of your own views, you should be concerned that we are entering an era in which these immensely influential publishers will routinely and selectively “unpublish” certain views and news.

We stumble into this egregious era at a moment when the political volume in many countries is turned to 10. The echo chamber has never been larger and the reverb room rarely more cacophonous. This is not an entirely new trend, but it has a compounding effect with the combination of “holier than thou” and “louder than thou.”

Curiously, this outcome is, in part, a result of the idealism of the Silicon Valley set, and there’s no doubt about the self-proclaimed ideals. They devoutly believe they are connecting people and informing them, which is true, even though some of the connections become conspiracies and much of the information is skimmed without concern to intellectual property rights.

Ideas aside, we were supposed to be in a magic age of metrics and data. Yet instead of perfect precision we have the cynical arbitraging of ambiguity — particularly in the world of audiences. Some advertising agencies are also clearly at fault because they, too, have been arbitraging and prospering from digital ambiguity as money in the ad business has shifted from actually making ads to aggregating digital audiences and ad tech, better known as fad tech.

And so, as the Times of London has reported, socially aware, image-conscious advertisers find themselves in extremely disreputable places — hardcore porn sites, neofascist sites, Islamist sites. The embarrassment for these advertisers juxtaposed with jaundice is understandable, but the situation is far more serious than mere loss of face.

If these sites are getting a cut of the commission, the advertisers are technically funding these nefarious activities. Depending on the type of advertising, it is estimated by the ad industry that a YouTube partner could earn about 55% of the revenue from a video. In recent years, how many millions of dollars have been channelled to organisations or individuals that are an existential threat to our societies?

Provenance is profound, and in this age of augmented reality and virtual reality, actual reality will surely make a comeback. Authenticated authenticity is an asset of increasing value in an age of the artificial — understanding the ebb and flow of humanity will not be based on fake news or ersatz empathy, but on real insight.

BY ROBERT THOMSON

Robert Thomson is the chief executive of News Corp, which owns The Australian and The Wall Street Journal. This is adapted from a speech he delivered on March 29 to the Asia Society in Hong Kong.

PETALING JAYA: The proliferation of fake news on social media has benefited publishers like Google and Facebook in terms of digital advertising market share at the expense of other media companies. News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson recently in his speech noted that Google and Facebook, for example, have close to two-thirds of the digital advertising market.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates they accounted for more than 90% of the incremental increase in digital advertising over the past year, he said.

The only cost of content for these companies has been lucrative contracts for lobbyists and lawyers, he added, noting that the social cost of that strategy is far more profound.

Thomson said this during his speech to the Asia Society in Hong Kong on March 29.

News Corp is also the owner of The Australian and The Wall Street Journal. “Google’s commodification of content knowingly, wilfully undermined provenance for profit. That was followed by the Facebook stream, with its journalistic jetsam and fake flotsam.

Together, the two most powerful news publishers in human history have created an ecosystem that is dysfunctional and socially destructive,’’ he said.

Both companies, he said could have done far more to highlight that there is a hierarchy of content, but instead they have prospered mightily by peddling a flat-earth philosophy that doesn’t distinguish between the fake and the real because they make copious amounts of money from both.

“It is beyond risible that Google and its subsidiary YouTube, which have earned many billions of dollars from other people’s content, should now be lamenting that they can’t possibly be held responsible for monitoring that content. Monetising yes, monitoring no – but it turns out that free money does come at a price.

“We all have to work with these companies, and we are hoping, mostly against hope, that they will finally take meaningful action, not only to allow premium content models that fund premium journalism, but also to purge their sites of the rampant piracy that undermines creativity,” Thomson said.

In his speech, he also said although “fake news” has seemingly, suddenly, become fashionable but in reality, the fake has proliferated for a decade or more.

But the faux, the flawed and the fraudulent are now pressing issues because the full scale of the changes wrought upon the integrity of news and advertising by the digital duopoly — Google and Facebook — has become far more obvious, he said.

Thomson also highlighted on the urgency of algorithms. Another area, he said that urgently needs much attention is the algorithms that Silicon Valley companies, and Amazon, routinely cite as a supposedly objective source of wisdom and insight.

“These algorithms are obviously set, tuned and repeatedly adjusted to suit their commercial needs.

“Yet they also blame autonomous, anarchic algorithms and not themselves when neofascist content surfaces or when a search leads to obviously biased results in favour of their own products,’’ he said.

A study reported in The Wall Street Journal found that in 25,000 random Google searches ads for Google products appeared in the most prominent slot 91% of the time.

“How is that not the unfair leveraging of search dominance and the abuse of algorithm?” he asked. All 1,000 searches for “laptops” started with an ad for Google’s Chromebook – 100% of the time.

And then there are the recently launched Google snippets, which stylistically highlight search results as if they were written on stone tablets and carried down from the mountain. Their sheer visual physicality gives them apparent moral force, he said.

“The word Orwellian is flagrantly abused, but when it comes to the all-powerful algorithms of Google, Amazon and Facebook, Orwellian is underused,’’ he said.

Thomson said: “What we now have is a backlash with which these omnipotent companies are uniquely ill-equipped to cope. Their responses tend to be political and politically correct.

Regardless of your own views, you should be concerned that we are entering an era in which these immensely influential publishers will routinely and selectively “unpublish” certain views and news.

He also faulted ad agencies as they have been arbitraging and prospering from digital ambiguity as money in the ad business has shifted from actually making ads to aggregating digital audiences and ad tech, better known as fad tech.

“Provenance is profound, and in this age of augmented reality and virtual reality, actual reality will surely make a comeback. Authenticated authenticity is an asset of increasing value in an age of the artificial – understanding the ebb and flow of humanity will not be based on fake news or ersatz empathy, but on real insight,’’ he added.

Sources: Starbiz

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